Новости компании SkimLinks

The SkimlinksвЂ™ solution provides publishers with a much needed tool to generate revenue from increasingly popular mobile content.

New York City and London, February 7, 2019 – Skimlinks, the leading content-to-commerce monetization platform has unveiled its proprietary application for AMP, which will enable publishers to automatically monetize their commerce content published on AMP. The solution, which is the first to market, opens up a new revenue opportunity for any publishers looking to monetize AMP traffic.

Data from Skimlinks on the content it monetizes shows that 59 percent of all impressions and 33 percent of revenue in its network now come from mobile content. Those statistics, combined with industry numbers that show top publishers can earn 25 percent of their revenue from commerce content, demonstrate the value to publishers of an easy to implement monetization solution for AMP articles.

Our AMP solution is inspired by AMPвЂ™s own mission to improve the mobile experience: It will enable publishers to bring their quality product advice to more readers and be fairly rewarded for the role they play in inspiring purchases at retailers. AMP now powers over 4 billion web pages around the world and with this solution weвЂ™re confident we can give commerce content a place on the smartphones where more and more readers engage with editorial publishersвЂ™ content. Said Skimlinks CEO Sebastien Blanc.

As readers and consumers become easier to reach through mobile content, the importance of a seamless experience when searching for and loading this content becomes increasingly important. For those publishers that see this trend reflected in their mobile traffic, initiatives such as AMP become increasingly important as it helps these pages load faster, providing an improved reading experience for users.

Blanc continued, вЂњWith the rapid growth of mobile for content and for commerce traffic, mobile monetization has been a top priority for almost every publisher we work with, which of course has made it a top priority for Skimlinks and I am thrilled we can now resolve this pain point for our customers. We know this will be a game changer for publishers around the world and are thrilled it has passed the stringent review of AMPвЂ™s community.вЂќ

Publishers in the Skimlinks network have already started integrating this solution including New York Media and Gamer Network, both of whom were thrilled with the ease of code implementation and use.

Camilla Cho, GM, eCommerce for New York Media stated, “We rolled out the Skimlinks AMP integration on The Strategist, as the implementation was simple and it provided us with the ability to easily monetize the affiliate links on our AMP articles, weвЂ™ve now implemented it across the rest of our titles including Vulture and The Cut.”

Jon Hicks, Head of Audience Development for Gamer Network added, вЂњThe Skimlinks AMP integration provided the Gamer Network with a simple solution to monetize our commerce content AMP articles. Deploying the code was straightforward and took only a few minutes.вЂќ

The solution solidifies Skimlinks position as the leader in content-to-commerce and offers publishers even greater scope for their commerce programs. Top publishers in SkimlinksвЂ™ network make 2000 times more revenue from commerce than low performers and with the AMP solution Skimlinks has developed a further application to help close that gap.

The Skimlinks AMP solution is now available to all publishers around the world and over 30 publishers have installed the code including New York Media, Gamer Network, Refinery29, Newsweek, and Reviewed.com.

For more information on this solution as well as the whole suite of products Skimlinks offers to aid publishers in generating meaningful and diverse revenue, please visit www.skimlinks.com.

About Skimlinks

Skimlinks is the leading commerce content monetization platform, supporting publishersвЂ™ creation of a new revenue stream that allows them to be less dependent on advertising. Commerce can contribute as much as a quarter of publishersвЂ™ overall revenue.

Skimlinks technology automatically earns publishers a share of sales they drive through monetized product links in commerce-related content. These links generate revenue when clicked on by readers who go on to make a purchase as a result.

In its platform, Skimlinks offers a growing suite of innovative solutions designed to increase the number of clicks and earnings per click of commerce-related content. It also aggregates access for publishers to over 60 affiliate networks, enabling them to earn commission from 27,000 merchants around the world instantly. Annual ecommerce transactions in SkimlinksвЂ™ network totaled $1 billion in 2017.

Clients include over half of the top 100 US & UK publishers by revenue including Conde Nast, Hearst, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Trinity Mirror, MailOnline, and more.

Publishers want to generate meaningful commerce revenue, but many struggle to know where to start or how to scale once their strategy is underway. Commerce can contribute up to 25% of revenue, but it takes time and money to make that happen.

So to help speed things up, Skimlinks has a launched a new solution, to help new publishers start their commerce strategies and established publishers to scale commerce into a key revenue stream for their business.

Skimlinks Editorial Commerce Content is a growing library of commerce content articles publishers can access on demand. At launch there are 75 articles in the library, with the plan to scale to 200 articles in coming months across all verticals.

Written by experts in our editorial team вЂ“ which is led by Chief Editor Shane Roberts вЂ“ the articles are free to access without upfront cost. Publishers can use articles on their site to increase the amount of commerce content on site and to grow revenue. Shane previously built a six-figure revenue line in commerce at Gizmodo.

To help maximise publisher revenue, we have negotiated with merchants to provide increased commission rates, all in excess of 10%, on products featured in the articles.

There are two types of Editorial Commerce Content available:

Evergreen Content

With a library of over 75 pieces of content to choose from at launch, Publishers can select articles that cover:

Tech

Home & Kitchen

Fashion and Grooming

Travel & Outdoors

With the Skimlinks Evergreen Content, Publishers can amend the copy to fit their audience and tone of voice or they can simply copy and paste the articles directly onto their site.

Credit Card Content

With CPAs approaching US$500, credit cards are a potentially lucrative affiliate revenue stream for Publishers. However, strict regulatory controls on this type of content make it very difficult for Publishers to get approved as affiliates.

Skimlinks has produced fully compliant credit card content which publishers can then use on their own sites, giving them access to these otherwise inaccessible programs.

It’s the game-changing Google chrome extension, that helps editors monetize commerce content they create on the fly. And now the Skimlinks Editor Toolbar Extension has a flash new walk-through video, to help you get to grips and get into action.

Without navigating away from a merchants website, editorвЂ™s can see:

If a merchant offers commission rates

What the average commission rate from the last 90 days was

If exclusive commission rates are available

With the Skimlinks Editor Toolbar, editors can also:

Find out more details on commission rates and merchants at the click of a button

Quickly create links for social media, email or newsletters

Discover new merchants that offer commission rates

Make monetizing your revenue easier by Editor Toolbar. You can download it here skimlinks.com/toolbar

WeвЂ™ve also produced a couple of videos on how the Merchant Search and Merchant Profile pages work in the Skimlinks Platform, watch the videos below for more information.

Merchant Profile pages provide Publishers with detailed information on the merchant, including any exclusive commission rates available from Skimlinks. Publishers can also find out the performance of the merchant across the Skimlinks platform, covering average Earnings Per Click (EPC); average conversion rate and average basket size.

The Merchant Search provides publishers with an easy way to discover merchants by category, country and the type of rates they offer.

Where to start? Q4 18 was our best quarter ever revenue-wise, signing up some of the largest publishers in the world (Yahoo, Discovery, Advance Local, Express, etc.), getting 100% customer satisfaction rate and 100% uptime through the 2-week-long busiest and biggest Black Friday ever, increasing our enterprise NPS from 7 to 48 in less than 8 months and improving the quality of our data and platform by successfully implementing the most innovative cloud technologies available: Kubernetes, Big Query, PubSub, etc.

These are all, without any doubt, great examples.

But the reason 2018 is so special is that for the first time in its 11-year history, through the hard work and discipline of the entire team, Skimlinks has turned into a profitable company, jumping from loss making to double-digit EBITDA in less than 9 months, while still growing and driving tens of millions of dollars to content publishers.

What better way to guarantee to all our customers that we are a partner for the long term, dedicated to growing their commerce revenue, not just over the next quarter, but over the next decade?

I am also incredibly proud to announce some changes in our management team:

Lauren Newman joins Skimlinks as VP, Revenue US. Lauren is a veteran of the publisher space. SheвЂ™s led 9-digit-revenue business units at household publishers like Meredith, Time Inc and Conde Nast, brings incredible industry knowledge and contacts, as well as the can do cultural outlook that allows Skimlinks to succeed. She will be a great addition to the management team and will help Skimlinks provide great support (ie. growth) to all our US-based enterprise publishers and advertisers.

Having done a terrific job at growing key global enterprise publishers and acquiring new ones, Dunia Silan becomes VP, Revenue EMEA & APAC and will focus on growth in EMEA. She will continue to forge stronger relationships with affiliate networks globally as well as use her experience of Australia and Asia-Pacific to build our presence in this fast growing market.

Matt Pivard, employee #1 of Skimlinks, becomes VP, Product, after he built our platform and, more recently, led our publisher line of products.

These new changes come after a hiring and promotions spree in 2018: Tamas Szikszai, employee #3 of Skimlinks, stepped up to run our London engineering hub, JC Gombeaud, ex-Yahoo! and ex-L’Express, joined us as VP Marketing, Shane Roberts, ex Commerce Editor at Gizmodo joined us as Chief Editor and Radek Maciaszek, in his second stint at Skimlinks, joined us as Chief Architect.

Shoppable content means lots of things to lots of people. But when Skimlinks talks about, it means вЂњcommerce contentвЂќ. That is to say articles that publishers write to help inspire and educate purchase journeys. Top publishers drive up to 25% of their annual revenue from ecommerce content. But, knowing where to start can be tricky, so weвЂ™ve put together a showcase of great examples of shoppable content to help you decide start:

Timely Articles

Focused on a particular time-limited promotion or deal or event, timely articles inspire a lot of sales in a short period of time and then are disposed of into the mass of content on the internet. The key thing is to give the reader all the information they need to act on the flash event and make a purchase: prices, what the promotion is, when the sale happens, where the reader can buy and crucially your timely editorial recommendation about what the best product for them to buy is.

Evergreen Articles

The counterpart to a flash event article is an evergreen one: Named for the type of tree that keeps leaves all year round. An evergreen article makes money all year around. It might not have the initial impact of a more timely piece, but if well looked after can keep earning for days. With a little maintenance now and again, it will keep on earning till the end of days. A good way to get started with these is content around particular ecommerce events like Black Friday or ValentineвЂ™s Day. Or you could think about timeless items, like jeans, that people buy once and wear forever.

Technology & Gadget Articles

Now sometimes understanding what products your readers are interested can be tricky. But from ten yearsвЂ™ experience in the business we know that one of the top two categories is technology and gadgets. These are high consideration purchases because the products – smartphones, laptops, wearables, tablets, TVs and more – are all high price items. So people try and educate themselves before they buy them. Peer reviews is one way, turning to editorial brands they know and trust is another. Articles range from product comparisons, to in-depth reviews of individual products, comparisons of product types and roundups of the top deals around major events like Black Friday.

Fashion Articles

Now as mentioned there is another category that comes out on top with our publishers and that is fashion. Fashion is a great opportunity for evergreen content – everything from jeans, to shoes, to sweatshirts that never go out of style. But you also have frequent new collections from fast fashion labels, trending items, brand new collections and fashion week content to create that can help you cash in on the sales your content generates.

Dedicated Commerce Brands

Now this is advanced and something that we would recommend to publishers once their commerce journey is well underway. However, we know that publishers that have sustained success with commerce, that want to scale their efforts have in multiple cases been able to spinoff their efforts into a separate dedicated commerce brand that only creates shoppable content.

The best here have a distinct tone of voice but also a keen focus on editorial. In the case of New York Magazine, itвЂ™s dedicated brand The Strategist is present as a natural extension of the magazineвЂ™s decades-long role telling inspiring peopleвЂ™s purchases. Hearst launched BestProducts.com in just six weeks, aiming to serve shoppers who need help making up their mind, but donвЂ™t want to have to do research through all the information available on the internet first.

The sites are designed to capitalise off commerce as a revenue stream, however they are also keenly aware that genuine recommendations are the key to their success. The minute they promote a product they donвЂ™t believe in they will lose their readers and their ability to generate revenue.

And there you have the absolute best examples of shoppable content we have to offer. Hopefully theyвЂ™ll inspire you to start creating compelling commerce content. To further help you in your journey, you can find the merchants we work with on this page, and start featuring them in the articles you write!

It has been a big year for Skimlinks. And as 2018 draws to a close, we want to reflect on our greatest hits from this year. So curl up somewhere warm and scroll through our list of the best things weвЂ™ve done in 2018:

Product, product, product!

ThereвЂ™s been so much output from Skimlinks’ Product Team, we actually started a Slack channel to help people keep up with updates: There have been over 300 this year!

But three releases were bigger than the other 300 put together and they were all designed around pain points we wanted to solve for publishers.

First we wanted to help publishers increase conversions and the earnings-per-click (EPC) on their articles. Shoppers are savvier, want the best price for what theyвЂ™re buying, and we know that if readers are given a choice of prices within an article they are more likely to buy a product, increasing conversions and EPC. Our partnership with Monetizer101 now offers this functionality and give publishersвЂ™ readers the widest possible choice of items.

Editors also want to know all the latest information about commission rates. So we overhauled our Google Chrome Editor Toolbar extension. It now shows exclusive rates a merchant offers publishers, gives the ability to create links without going via the Publisher Hub, and lets teams see the different rates offered to their different domains.

And lastly, we wanted to conquer the last great frontier: mobile. Mobile traffic has surged in recent years, and overtook desktop this year as the browsing channel of choice on Black Friday for the first time. But thereвЂ™s been a consistent conversion gap. Courtesy of our first-to-market Google AMP solution, publishers can now monetize their AMP articles and open the gateway to earning significant revenues from mobile content.

The inaugural Commerce Awards for Publishers (also known as The CAPS)!

Commerce content can be responsible for up to 25% of a publishersвЂ™ revenue. But it lacks the same recognition as wider spread revenue streams like subscriptions and display advertising. So we wanted to find a vehicle to showcase commerce content excellence from Skimlinks publishers and share best practices with the wider industry.

We were thrilled to entertain clients of all shapes and sizes at the event in New York in September and canвЂ™t wait to celebrate again soon in 2019!

Commerce content works to increase engagement on editorial sites

We believe commerce content is the only revenue stream that actually improves the experience publishers offer to readers.

And this year we published the research that proves it: Working with GQ, we showed that people that interact with commerce content spend twice as much time on content overall and are nearly 10% more likely to return than people who donвЂ™t interact with commerce articles.

To have our findings published in AdExchanger and Digidayis both a testament to the great work GQ is doing, and the advantages to publishers of creating commerce content.

New faces, new places

On a personnel front it has been a huge year for Skimlinks. Our new CEO Sebastien Blanc has fast made his mark since his appointment in April and weвЂ™ve picked up a VP of Marketing and Chief Data Architect to head up vital teams in the business. WeвЂ™ve also hired a massive 29 people since January which is helping power our momentum as an organization as we enter 2019.

Senior Commercial Director Dunia Silan addresses the crowd at Affiliate Summit APAC in Singapore in October

On top of that we have been all over the world this year, raising the profile of commerce content to publishers. The team has made stops in Chicago, Las Vegas, Singapore, Sydney, Paris, Cologne and more.

In total over 4000 publishers have joined our network this year and we canвЂ™t wait to help them grow their commerce revenue in 2019. It has been a fantastic year and we are even more ambitious as we approach 2019. Our focus is now on the horizon, furthering our work to help publishers earn as much commerce revenue as possible, and continue to provide market leading solutions to support that goal. Onwards and upwards!

Skimlinks and its board are incredibly proud to announce Greg ColemanвЂ™s addition to its board of directors. Greg brings incredible experience of the Publisher space, having held senior positions in some of the most prominent and successful digital publishers in the world: EVP, Global Sales at Yahoo, President at AOL Time Warner, President at Huffington Post and President at Buzzfeed – 3 of which are long term Skimlinks customers. Greg also has a world-class track record in the advertising space, having joined Criteo in 2011 as President, contributing to its IPO in 2013 at $2.5b.

Through his tenure at Buzzfeed, Greg observed first hand how successful commerce content could be if done properly. He and his team spearheaded one of the most aggressive commerce growth strategies in the space – powered by Skimlinks – building a team of 30 people dedicated to helping BuzzfeedвЂ™s audience find products theyвЂ™ll love, and generating an 8-digit brand new revenue line as a result.

Skimlinks aims at being the best commerce monetization platform for content publishers – especially to those wanting to diversify from Amazon. Greg will give Skimlinks the insights it needs to make sure it fulfils this mission and additional operational expertise to help the team deliver the best possible results for publishers.

According to Greg, вЂњPublishers are looking diligently at finding new and sustainable ways to add new revenue streams that will help monetize the content that they are creating. Skimlinks delivers a seamless solution for the intersection of commerce and content.вЂќ

Having a world-class talent like Greg joining Skimlinks’ board also testifies to the brand and company we have built and to the potential of our strategy.

As market leaders, our focus is on developing products that will allow Publishers to increase the revenue they generate from their commerce content and be less dependant on display ads. Which is why we are excited to be first-to-market with an AMP integration that delivers a solution for problem that many publishers have.

From our Platform data we see that there is a huge opportunity for publishers to increase the revenue they get from mobile traffic: 59% of impressions in our network come from mobile but only 33% of revenue publishers generate is from mobile.

The AMP code only needs to be installed once. Then there is nothing else to do. No manual workarounds, no specific maintenance needed to monetize content. The Skimlinks AMP integration will automatically affiliate commerce content across all your AMP articles.

Please note: The Skimlinks AMP code is available for publishers to install now, however as a BETA product, we recommend you QA test within your environment before you push the code live.

A little overview on AMPAMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it is an open source program from Google aimed at making a вЂњbetter, faster mobile internetвЂќ. It means users coming from search pages being shown web pages in essentially no time. This happens because a large portion of the pageвЂ™s original content can be stripped away and the page is optimised for mobile.

Black Friday 2018 is on the horizon, but that doesnвЂ™t mean youвЂ™ve run out of time to take advantage of one of the biggest ecommerce events of the year.

In fact our data shows that the majority of the top Black Friday commerce content articles are published in November. Moreover our data shows Black Friday kicks off a wider holiday season, where publishers in our network on average double their revenue, and have the opportunity to inspire millions of reader purchases with compelling commerce content.

So weвЂ™ve created an infographic packed with digestible insights to help you seize the holiday opportunity on Black Friday and beyond which includes:

Key dates for your holiday season ecommerce calendar

The key merchants you should write about on Black Friday and beyond

And the key conversion movers for 2018

The high converting content you should create

The keywords you should use for SEO success

And design points to keep in mind to ensure people can convert off your content wherever theyвЂ™re reading it

Black Friday is the biggest commerce event of the year and Skimlinks has made the whole process of getting the best deals and offers from the leading merchants very simple.

We have launched the Skimlinks Black Friday Shopping Galleries.

Why Publishers should use the Black Friday Shopping Galleries

Publishers who add shopping galleries to their articles, could see an increase in Earnings Per Click (EPC) of +59%, compared to other commerce articles.

The latest deals and offers will automatically appear in the Shopping Galleries. So no need, for content creators to continually search for new deals/offers or to continually update links. It really is that simple!

The Shopping Galleries are now live and will automatically be updated, every three hours, from today through to Cyber Monday, maximising the revenue opportunities of this key period.

How Publishers are Using the Black Friday Shopping Galleries

A number of publishers have already started to promote and generate revenue from their Black Friday Shopping Galleries.

How Many Shopping Galleries are there to Choose From?

We have created over 15 Black Friday Shopping Galleries for publishers to choose from. They cover the best deals and offers from leading merchants in the US and UK and from high performing product categories.

How to drive the most revenue from the Black Friday Shopping Galleries

Ensure the Shopping Galleries appear high on the page, visibility drives conversions

Start embedding the Shopping Galleries before Black Friday

Add the Shopping Galleries to your Evergreen Black Friday content,В these will already have SEO ranking and will be more easily discovered

Accessing the Black Friday Shopping Galleries

The Black Friday Shopping Galleries are available to publishers in the US and UK only.

All Skimlinks Managed Accounts in these countries have access to the Black Friday Shopping Galleries, please speak to your Account Manager to activate the Shopping Galleries Tab in the Publisher Hub.

For all other US and UK based publishers, to qualify for the Black Friday Shopping Galleries, you must beВ generating more than $1,000/ВЈ1,000 of commerce revenue per month. If your site qualifies please get in touch with our team at blackfriday@skimlinks.com

Creating a Black Friday Shopping Gallery

Once you have access to the Black Friday Shopping Galleries, there are a few simple steps to get the live and generating revenue

First, go to the Shopping Galleries tab in the Publisher Hub

Choose either a Product or Merchant Gallery. Each gallery comes with a red or green button and you can choose between grid or carousel layout so you can select the one that best fits the style of your page

Copy the Shopping Gallery Code and paste it into the page you want them to appear

The Shopping Gallery will automatically display the latest deals and offers on your page.

Revenue generated from the Black Friday Shopping Galleries will be reported in the Publisher Hub as normal.